Drinking to Art History Again...

Today the opposite of tomato is 'this new Kurt Weill razor unit, made with the highest British attention to the wrong detail'


graphite & putty eraser with watercolour/30x20cm

...Even if only with a shandy on this particular occasion!

As a perfect example of found 'roadkill' subject/object matter for the continuing diptych series of drawings, this can displaying the branded legend 'Bass' (& aestheticized most pleasingly with patches of rust) certainly got the old art historical juices flowing, recalling instances where it had occurred previously, at least a couple of times in Cubist table top still life compositions by Picasso,



(both images from Harrison, Frascina & Perry 'Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction', Yale/OU)

and the iconic red triangle also featured earlier (1881-2), amongst the array of bottles upon either side of the 'Bar at the Folies-Bergere' by Manet.


(image from Bernard 'The Impressionist Revolution', Macdonald Orbis)

Soundtrack:


Chris Whitley 'Living With the Law'
Duke Special 'Songs From the Deep Forest'
The Fall '50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong'

Remembering John Peel again, at the time of the fifth anniversary of his passing (26th October), & a fitting tribute provided by the sonic juggernaut of The ('Mighty') Fall, appropriately magnificent after all these years, 'Classical-ly' so, indeed.

More 'Readymade Cubism'

graphite & putty eraser with watercolour/30x20cm

Continuing the diptych drawings processed from the subject/object matter of found, ‘Readymade Cubist’, roadkill cans, with, in this instance, the aluminium object displaying an extensive & rather attractive patina of rust in addition to the colours of its branded livery.

The sheer presence of the rust, its visual, aesthetic quality, demanded that it be represented in colour, an imperative reinforced when considering its art historical relationship to what might be termed the smoked, metallic colour scheme of earthy browns & greys that characterizes Cubist painting in its ‘hermetic’ stage. Interesting to note how, in the original drawing-as-object, the finish of the dried watercolour on the paper so closely replicates that of the physical surface of the rust itself.

Additionally, as might be observed from an example of illustrated facing pages from Harrison, Frascina & Perry's ‘Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction’, featuring Picasso’s ‘Ma Jolie’ (left) & Braque’s ‘Le Portugais’, such paintings’ compositions are constructed around a central triangular form, intersected by horizontals & verticals, thus providing a further aspect of inspiration, & informing the arrangement of the reformed, now essentially diamond-shaped object within the drawing.


In this instance, with such references already made, the mark-making of the drawing’s ground as an explicit aspect of its facture is also informed by the nature of the short, horizontal, regular brushstrokes present & visible in the paintings’ surfaces.

Soundtrack:


Mazzy Star 'So Tonight That I Might See'
Rufus Wainwright 'Want 2'

Flat-out Fantastic

graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

Being another example of the aluminium can ‘roadkill’ diptych sub-series, this found-object presented itself as a suitable model primarily through the sharp-edged folding to which its form had been subjected during the flattening process it had obviously undergone (seemingly over the course of numerous, repeated occasions, to the point of almost perfect two-dimensionality: in cricketing parlance, it appears to have been gone over, carefully, with a heavy roller). This in turn suggested a particular correspondence with certain examples of both Braque's & Picasso’s Cubist painting, of the period 1911-12 when such practice was developing into what might be termed a refined state (its so-called 'Hermetic' phase), characterised by an explicit flattening of depth towards the picture surface & faceting of forms into overlapping planes, giving the whole a fragmented, shattered appearance: note too the application of lettering in the form of truncated words & (brand) names which of course finds an echo in the brand identity of the can’s livery.


Georges Braque 'The Portuguese'
oil on canvas/1911


Pablo Picasso 'Ma Jolie'
oil on canvas/1911-12

Soundtrack:


New Order 'Movement'
The Associates 'Fourth Drawer Down'/'Sulk'
Portishead 'Third'

Drawing & Photography

graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm
original source: 'Daily Mirror' 08/08/08

The appeal of this particular source image resides mostly in it featuring drawings as photographed, representations reproduced, in relation to the portrait itself, thus enabling the Project to again engage in the process of various levels of representation (&, on this occasion, styles too), the musing-upon of which has occurred in the past, & notably here.


Jasper Johns 'untitled'
charcoal & pastel on paper/1986

Such a work as this untitled one by Jasper Johns features the notion of drawings within the drawing itself, the individual 'sheets' pinned to the 'ground' with illusionistic nails that reference certain Cubist & trompe l'oeil paintings. The central drawing of the three is of an image appropriated by Johns from Picasso's painting 'Woman With a Straw Hat' of 1936 which, if one wishes to play postmodernist games, raises questions of authorship & the nature of, as does, I suppose, my own drawing, in which another artist's style is 'appropriated'. In relation to the theme of the previous post, Johns' work presents particularly fertile ground for semiotic exploration - as in, for example, Fred Orton's book 'Figuring Jasper Johns' - being symbolically allusive in addition to playing with various codes & methods of representation.

The painting-within-a-painting or film-within-a-film are quite familiar aspects of the history of those particular visual arts, &, indeed, I was struck by such a coincidence whilst processing this drawing after having recently enjoyed, once again, Almodovar's 'Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down', which features films-within-the-film both in the production of a fictional movie as an element of the narrative & the appearance of an existing one - Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead' - as viewed on TV, in addition to other cinematic references such as the inclusion in a director's cutting room of a poster advertising the film 'Invasion of the Bodysnatchers'.

Interesting to note that such 'police artist' representations as those featured in the drawing(s-within-the-drawing) follow what appear to be strict stylistic conventions, almost to the extent that each example of the genre could be the work of the very same artist.

Soundtrack:

'Test Match Special' Eng v SA 4th Test, 5th day


White Stripes 'Elephant' & 'De Stijl'
Charlotte Gainsbourg '5:55'

Pies & Picasso

graphite, putty eraser & digital collage/815x1200px, drawing 20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 04/08

This attraction of this particular newspaper photograph as suitable source material for transcription in the form of drawing first suggested itself through the presence of the chequered tiled floor, which, in colour, is red & pale yellow, bringing to mind very much such a work of art as Carl Andre's floor piece 'Copper Magnesium Plain' (see this post for a previous reminder of & reference to Andre & a similar work).


Carl Andre 'Copper Magnesium Plain' 1969

And then I noticed the pie: of course, it features, courtesy of its latticed pastry topping, our dearly beloved Modernist grid, but, more than this, the rim of its crust suggested a very close affinity with the rope edging Picasso applied as the finishing touch to his oval format 'Still Life with Chair Caning' - as perhaps noted previously, if one looks at enough art (which, of course, can never be achieved), visual achoes occur almost everywhere.


Pablo Picasso 'Still Life with Chair Caning' 1912
oil & pasted oilcloth on canvas, & rope/27x35cm

Having processed the drawing with this in mind, the inclusion of Picasso's object-painting within the picture came to seem imperative. By a combination of digital processes - including resizing, slight distortion of shape (narrowed to the right), conversion from colour to monochrome & then collaging onto/into the scanned image of the original drawing, with shadow drawn with a digital 'pencil' tool as a final touch - an image of 'Still Life with Chair Caning' was thus incorporated into the drawing, as 'hanging' on the rear wall, establishing a visual analogue with the pie.

Picasso's painting is a fascinating example of the ground-breaking artform of so-called 'Synthetic' Cubism (actually existing on the cusp of the 'Analytic' & 'Synthetic'), whereby actual fragments of matter from the real world & everyday life are incorporated, synthesized, into the picture: in this case, Picasso uses a piece of oilcloth onto which a pattern (grid-like!) resembling textured chair caning has been printed - a mass-produced item co-existing with, within, a unique artefact - & also frames his painting with a length of rope that is perceived both as itself, a real thing, whilst also suggesting the carved edge of a wooden table top which, of course, the viewer 'reads' when apprehending the still life collection of represented objects (or 'significant' fragments of) - including a newspaper, pipe & glass - on the picture plane.

Further to the 'game' that Picasso is playing with representation, levels of, & the various means by which it/they might be achieved in such an instance - the 'jou' of the 'journal' title of the newspaper could also suggest the French 'joue(r)' - the inclusion of the rope as a framing device might also be a little in-joke, alluding to Braque & Picasso's notion of themselves being 'mountaineers roped together', scaling new heights of pictorial exploration through Cubism, particularly the development into the realm of papiers colles & collage, where art & life meet through the inclusion of actual materials along with pictorial representations of, that serve to both exist in & as themselves or otherwise symbolically suggest something else.


In similar manner to this drawing, Bernardo Bertolucci's film 'The Dreamers' quotes from cinematic history, inserting clips from e.g. Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich & such examples from the French nouvelle vague as Jean-Luc Godard into the course of its narrative of the lives - in the context of the social & political upheaval of May 1968 Paris - of its three young cinephile protagonists. A gorgeous-looking piece of cinema (not least in the form of the central triumvirate of its cast), ravishingly photographed, richly sensual & decadent. The DVD also includes an excellent, extensive 'making-of' feature, among the very best of its kind, fascinating in the manner in which it describes the temporal & cultural context of the film & insightfully explains the process of its creation.

Soundtrack:


Lambchop 'Is a Woman'/'Is a Bonus'
Tunng 'Good Arrows'

Maxximum Emotion

Today the opposite of tomato is "a little down with a lifetime to go"...


graphite & watercolour/20x30cm
original source: ‘The Guardian’ 22/05/08

Contemporaneous with photographic images in the daily newspapers of the anguished faces of surviving victims of the Chinese earthquake, & uncontrollably blubbing incompetent footballers (you know who), appeared the source from which this drawing was transcribed, illustrating an advertisement for the store TK Maxx urging potential customers not to be left upset at missing the bargains available through their latest designer promotion. Scanning through the pages of the newspaper, the images obviously occupy similar weight at a purely visual level, & indeed this one was chosen as raw material because it displayed the most aesthetic appeal to me (accusations of superficiality would be, of course, entirely warranted). However, removed, liberated from its original context, & drawn in monochrome from a vividly coloured source, the image has the potential to take on new meaning for any spectator, dependent on their subjectivity & perhaps assuming no prior knowledge of the source. Interesting to remark, then, upon the recourse to signs to signify such as emotion: here, in an entirely artificial construct, the wildly dishevelled hair, mascara-streaked cheeks, set of the mouth on the cusp of tremulousness & look in the eyes suggest, express a ‘significant’ degree of distress at odds with the everyday reality of the situation – this, of course, is also what acting, theatre, cinema does, in common with this image in both its original form & drawn representation, to varying degrees of convincing believability.

Perhaps the most iconic image of a weeping woman would be Picasso’s 1937 painting of that title, produced subsequent to his masterpiece of the Spanish Civil War, ‘Guernica’, which itself features a grieving female figure amongst its cast, & of which the image below is a related drawing. Aware of the historical, contextual references informing the paintings, one can be utterly convinced of the emotional charge they convey & the resonance they have, however stylized, aestheticized the representation.


Picasso 'Woman Weeping' drawing

Soundtrack:


Elvis Costello & the Attractions 'Girls Girls Girls'
Scott Walker 'Sings Jacques Brel'

A Pasted Paper (r)Evolution

Today the opposite of tomato is ‘American Splendor’


graphite & pasted paper photocopy/20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' G2 09/04/08


Ralph Goings 'Breakfast Menu'
watercolour/1979

Having previously cited the photorealist paintings of Ralph Goings, when contextualizing an earlier drawing, the original photographic source of this latest drawing in The Project - illustrating an advertisement (again) for a forthcoming Guardian ‘good breakfasts’ guide publication, & featuring a diner table top still life of condiment containers the like of which Goings has regularly used as prosaic subject matter - presented itself as an obvious & welcome candidate for transcription.

Furthermore, the source image enabled a re-engagement with the still life genre which has occupied my creative endeavour for many years - indeed up until this last new year & the birth of the current Project transcribing print media images - but with an interesting twist: having always previously worked directly from three-dimensional objects themselves, existing & arranged in real space, doing so on this occasion from a pre-existing image & flat, 2-D, ‘model’ presented a new challenge.
The background of the photographic image also provided a particular point of interest, with the horizontal-vertical pattern of the textured, ‘Anaglypta’-type wallpaper suggesting a variation on the old faithful Modernist grid, relating particularly at this point to the recent drawing of crosses & its contextual relationship to examples of Mondrian’s intermediate paintings & drawings (see this post).
At some point, rather than represent this wholly by drawing, it occurred that it might be of interest to so by other means in conjunction with drawing &, having previously & frequently used actual textured wallpaper as the physical grounds, or sections of, for still life paintings (back in the day…), the notion of pasted paper sections suggested itself as appropriate in this particular instance, especially considering the original precedent of such in the development of Cubism by Braque & Picasso (a ‘Revolution’ as termed by the critic Clement Greenberg, their presence on the picture plane declaring its flatness & fatally disrupting the project of pictorial illusionism), also of course within the realm of the still life & oft featuring café table top settings, thus returning the drawing neatly to its original photographic source & establishing a link between these artists & Goings of a later generation of (Post)Modernists: it is wonderful & a privilege indeed to have the opportunity to engage with the abundant history of visual art in such a manner, to indulge in such playfulness-with-a-purpose.


Georges Braque 'Fruit Dish & Glass'
charcoal & pasted paper/1912


Pablo Picasso 'Violin'
charcoal & pasted newspaper/1912

Of course, in this instance, the textured wallpaper of the source image was in fact as flat in nature as the depicted objects (rather like Glenn Brown’s meticulously painted, insistently two-dimensional representations, like reproductions in a book & as though referenced from such a source, of Frank Auerbach paintings, the originals of course thickly textured to the point of sculptural objecthood). Rather than compromise the integrity of the source image by cutting out sections to use in the transcribed drawing, I decided to take photocopies & use these as the pasted paper elements within the composition, linked by drawing, thus adding a further level of reproduction & representation to the whole…
Of course, the addition of the pasted papers to the drawing - itself, of course, transcribed from a two-dimensional source - actually create a building-up of the surface of the page, & thus a three-dimensional object, albeit of a subtle nature & almost imperceptibly so, which returns us to the (original) subject (matter) of still life..!

I should also mention at this point, whilst very much on the subject, the fascinating artist's blog Papiers Collés, regularly updated with examples of handmade collages & well worth a visit.


Coincidental to relate, but, upon completing the drawing, I subsequently watched the film ‘American Splendor’ which features all manner of play of various levels of representation collaged together into a whole. Essentially, the narrative is that of aspects of the life of the anti-hero Harvey Pekar, the mundanities of which were aestheticized in the form of comic strips &, subsequently, books, & is composed of numerous means including: cinematic, dramatized recreations-representations played by actors; appearances by Harvey Pekar himself, his wife, workmates, etc, in both linking, contextualizing interviews-to-camera & recreations of events such as his retirement party featuring this real cast of characters; footage of televised appearances by the real Pekar on the real David Letterman show - & acted dramatizations of such - & also those of a workmate who achieved cult, self-declared ‘nerd’ status on MTV; & graphic, comic strip elements appropriate to the subject matter of the narrative. It’s all quite a combination, unusual & inventive, again playful with the conventions of representation & its various means, & a most enjoyable experience as a film, one with a profoundly human quality at its heart, glad to have been seen, certainly, & especially on such an occasion.

Soundtrack:


Lambchop ‘How I Quit Smoking’
Belle & Sebastian ‘Tigermilk’
The Delgados ‘The Great Eastern’

Cross Purposes

Today the opposite of tomato is the handclaps on Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ ‘The Weeping Song’ & Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Seymour Stein’ (especially the first one, where the instrumental coda kicks in)


graphite/20x30cm
original source: ‘The Times’ 19/03/08

The appeal of this photographic source image was immediate in formal terms, with its reminder to me of such images of Mondrian’s as ‘Pier & Ocean’ & ‘Composition in Line’ from the final transitional stage of his painting before his arrival at Neoplasticism, his mature & iconic style: in effect, the white crosses against a darker-toned ground could be seen as ‘negatives’ of the black forms on white grounds of the Mondrian paintings, in which it is clear to see how he was soon to be able to coalesce his ‘plus/minus’ formal language (regularized, geometricized from more sinuous, curving, organic forms) of horizontal & vertical marks, draw them out, into his characteristic grids (& thus leave a huge legacy to Modernist painting).


Piet Mondrian ‘Composition #10 in Black & White (Pier and Ocean)’
Oil on canvas/1915


Piet Mondrian ‘Composition in Line’
Oil on canvas/1917

Another link to Modernist art history is provided by the insistently vertical composition of the photo, recalling that of Braque & Picasso in their earliest Cubist paintings, developing the formal explorations made by Cezanne - all these examples in the context of the landscape - with Mondrian in turn developing his work from Cubism, making the breakthrough into a purely abstract language from which Braque & Picasso had retreated when diverting their Cubist explorations into the realm of collage, introducing fragments of the recognizably real world back into their images which, with their ‘hermetic’ Cubist work, had become almost abstract.


With the current drawing project using photographic sources as its inspiration, it’s particularly appropriate, perhaps, to be reading at present ‘Vermeer’s Camera’, Philip Steadman’s most interesting study of and exploration into the artist’s possible-probable use of the camera obscura, one of the earliest forms of ‘image making’ technology. Fascinating contents, including much historical information & reconstructions in real space of Vermeer’s compositions and a camera obscura, seeming to present compelling evidence of the artist’s use of such equipment in the making of his paintings, the evolution of his style, as, similarly, did David Hockney’s broader-ranging (in terms of artists researched) ‘Secret Knowledge’ a few years ago (wonderful book, especially the reproductions & Hockney’s correspondence with Martin Kemp, the dialogue between them as Hockney’s findings & ideas develop, & a magical TV documentary, I recall). But still the sheer beauty of the paintings, Vermeer’s touch, his miraculous representation of light, remains, whatever explanations or hypotheses may be advanced.

More Grids

Today the opposite of tomato is ( )

Sometimes it's amazing just how serendipitous the occurrence of certain images can be.
Following on from the newspaper photo used as source material for the recent drawing featuring the check-patterned dress, came this picture, sequentially most appropriate & also perfectly relating in formal terms to the working methods of many artists, particularly those involved in the transcription of photographs.
Again, the lure of the old faithful modernist grid proved irresistible, particularly when presented in such an explicit form. Such a source image also provided the opportunity, the invitation, to transcribe it into a drawing in a classically systematic manner by a cell-by-cell process beginning in the top left hand corner, working horizontally to the right & then in this manner line-by-line vertically, to finish in the bottom right, the first time I’d ever attempted such an approach, this process being tempered slightly by occasional returns to make tonal revisions of certain individual cells as necessary once a more all-over tonal pattern began to emerge as the systematic process progressed.


graphite/20x30cm
original source: 'The Times' 22/02/08

As an example of the squaring-up & transcribing process, I shall cite the work & working methods of Chuck Close, to whom I’ve already made reference during the course of this year’s drawing-from-photographs project, illustrated by one of his measured-up ‘photo maquettes’ & then the finished painting, the scale of which is quite breath-taking when seen in relation to the artist himself.



Although this is an early work of Close’s & his technique & style have developed considerably since the 60s, still his adherence to the grid endures: indeed, it became & has remained an explicit element of the paintings’ form, with each cell its own perfectly-formed abstract picture within the complete brightly-coloured picture, the all-over patterned design from which can be discerned the figurative elements, coalescing & dissolving, of the human head upon which, in photographic form, it is based.

It’s fascinating, indeed, to trace the progress of the grid in Modernist painting, from its genesis in Cezanne's increasing statement of series of horizontals & verticals parallel to the picture’s edges, through the scaffolding of Braque’s & Picasso’s Cubism, to Mondrian’s gradual development culminating in his explicit, rigid, black-lined grid structures, & then the grid’s frequent subsequent recurrence in various forms in the work of such diverse artists as Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman & Close amongst others. Once referred to an ‘unreconstructed modernist’, the grid remains something to which I’m drawn…quite literally in this latest example of drawing practice & process!

Soundtrack:


Sigur Ros ‘Aegytis Byrjun’, ( ) & 'Takk'
Rachel Unthank & the Winterset ‘The Bairns’